Tuesday, 17 May 2011

The more distinguished ancestry of Catherine [Katherine] Parr

Sir Thomas Parr was of a more distinguished ancestry than either Sir Thomas Boleyn (father of Queen Anne Boleyn) or Sir John Seymour (Queen Jane Seymour). From the marriage of his Norman progenitor Ivo Taillebois with Lucy of Bolingbroke came the Barony of Kendal. Ivo de Tallebois was the first Baron of Kendal and maintained the state of a petty sovereign in the north. His male line is thought to have failed with William de Lancaster II, the seventh in descent. Therefore the honour and estates of that mighty family passed to his sole heiress, Helwise of Lancaster who married Gilbert FitzRichard. Their granddaughter, Margaret, by Helwise de Lancaster and Peter le Brus (kin to Robert de Brus, King of Scotland) married the younger son of Robert, Lord Roos of Hamlake and Werks by Isabella, the illegitimate daughter of William the Lion, King of Scotland and his mistress, the daughter of Richard Avenel. Their grandson, Sir Thomas de Roos married Katharine, the daughter of Sir Thomas Strickland of Sizergh Castle in Westmorland, now Cumbria. The fruit of this union was an only daughter Elizabeth who brought Kendal Castle and a rich inheritance into queen Katharine's paternal house by Elizabeth's marriage with Sir William Parr. Sir William Parr, the grandson of this pair, was made knight of the Garter and married Lady Elizabeth, one of the co-heiresses of the Lord Fitzhugh, by Lady Alice Neville, daughter of Sir Ralph de Neville, 1st Earl of Westmorland and Lady Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland, daughter of John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster and Katherine Roet. Alice Neville was a niece to King Henry VIII's great-grandmother Cicely Neville, Duchess of York and through this connection, Catharine Parr was Henry's maternal third cousin, once removed and by his father's descent from John Beaufort, 1st Earl of Somerset a fourth cousin, once removed.

By her mother's side, the Greene's of Greens Norton, she directly descended from King Fergus of Galloway and many nobles and Kings of England which included Henry I of England, Edward I of England, and Henry II of England through her connections with the Ferrers of Groby, Talbot, Despencer, FitzAlan, De Clare, and other noble families. They were also cousins to Elizabeth Woodville, queen consort to Edward IV.